Architectural Design III: On Display (Emerson)

Abstract

Bahnhofstrasse is the site of the most dramatic changes in Zurich. 19th century urbanisation saw it turn Zurich from a town on the river to a city on the lake.The end of shopping has been approaching slowly but surely since we became digital, until Covid dealt it a final blow. Manor is gone. The others will follow. But what will happen to Bahnhofstrasse?

Objective

Analysis Undertake several types of research simultaneously including: Qualitative site/building analysis (photographic, drawing) Systematic analysis (inventory of uses, material history, social history, etc…) Technical analysis (geology, climate, ecology) Interpret and synthesise information above into a concise and ongoing knowledge base for the design project. Assimilate small, fragmentary observations into broad understanding of place, building, etc… Architectural design Design a small sized building incorporating external spaces and other supporting amenities. Use tight programmatic constraints as a creative stimulus for the spatial organisation of the building. Develop a tectonic strategy as central theme in design project. Use building design to demonstrate understanding of wider landscape. Use building design to propose new ways of inhabiting or experiencing wider landscape. Demonstrate ability to manipulate formal architectural language as an end in itself. Technical Develop method of analysis of a central material or construction thesis in term of environmental performance. Demonstrate understanding of principal structural, environmental and constructional performance. Representation Develop a deep understanding of the status and purpose of architectural representation: drawing, sketch, model, text, image... Develop critical ‘eye’ in photographic recording of place. Develop critical understanding of orthographic drawing: artefact versus data (including scale, line weight, surface, construction, …) Develop ability to make fast sketch models and complex presentation models with precise conceptual purpose. General skills Demonstrate ability to work, learn and communicate as a whole studio, in small groups and individually. Demonstrate high level of technical and critical standard in 2D CAD drafting. Develop ability to assimilate a broad range of working practices.

Content

Shopping is over. Just like that. The social and economic revolution that gave form and style to the nineteenth century city has slipped into the palm of our hand leaving the city centre in search renewed purpose. But if the human transactions are moving from over the counter to the digital ether, the desires, freedoms, walks and talks, will not be so easily privatised. The industrial revolution produced a previously unimaginable quantity and variety of things for which the department store was invented – following the prototype of the Crystal Palace (1851) a detournement of the gardener’s greenhouse and produced an irresistible spectacle for the rising bourgeoisie. The architecture and in particular large glass shopfronts rivalled the marvels of museums and gardens. Behind glass, everything is seductive. No doubt the dual reflection and transparency of expansive glass vitrines brought with it a new spatial experience, describing complex enclosures and openings, fusing all materials together to form the contemporary city. And perhaps it was glass itself that most changed the nature of public space. It promises openness through transparency but delivers exclusivity in reflection. We will continue to work in our garden in parallel with our architectural journey. Working together, we will begin the next chapter of the garden. We will establish a new series of rooms in the landscape in parallel with those of the studio and of the city. And, weather permitting, use the rooms in the garden as a studio space. After a semester of interior confinement, we will use our spaces to maximise our time together and our time outside, in the garden and in the city. Or is the city already a garden waiting to be rediscovered? You will be designing two rooms, one interior and one exterior and, most importantly, the membrane that holds them together or separates them. Like Split or the spatial transformations imagined in romantic ruins, the city will change again. Can a new natural city emerge from the interaction of two rooms? Can glass still provide the magic encounter? These two rooms will start with the architecture and nature of the city of today and project them with all the force of current events into the future. The city will be different. Architecture will be different. Materials will be different. Nature is different. But they are rooted in where we came from, be it a muddy ditch below the street or a distant land. The new rooms will be found in the existing city. They may be turned inside out, reversed, excavated or filled but all forms of re-use because as Bruno Latour has famously stated, design is only ever re-design. The end of retail could precipitate a radical transformation of the city, recasting what exists in a new natural order sensitive to the needs of humans and every other species with whom we share the planet but have expelled in our drive to consume. But Zürich’s main shopping street was not shaped only by the retail revolution. By the time the first iteration of Zürich’s Hauptbahnhof was built in 1847, the city walls had already been destroyed and the ditches sealed. Protest and disease are recurring themes in the city’s history. Textile workers’ revolts and the social divisions between town and countryside sparked the uprising in 1839 and the destruction of the old fortifications. Silk merchants converted their massive wealth and property into the banking institutions of today’s city, their houses and gardens forming the footprint for metropolitan expansion. Following cholera epidemics of the 19th C, the muddy ditch, the Fröschengraben was sealed over to become the Bahnhofstrasse, and with it the last traces of an agrarian society. Commerce, protest and later civic action led by Bürkli transformed a town on the river into a city on the lake.

Resources